


the ways we change; the ways we remain

by shizuumi151



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Canon Compliant, Character Study, Childhood, Gen, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:00:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27534157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shizuumi151/pseuds/shizuumi151
Summary: Claude von Riegan grows up.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	the ways we change; the ways we remain

**Author's Note:**

> i had this for the claude fanzine, once upon a time. i never finished it, dropped out of the zine, focused on schoolwork, and left it in my drafts. i rediscovered it again recently, and maybe i can give it a nice ending
> 
> here's to the best character in three houses

Hidden from the Almyran palace, built from brimstone and laden with straw, the hut is warmly lit. Dusk powders Fòdlan’s Throat in the distance. The cragged rocks of the mountain range tear open the sky like the teeth of a beast's maw, dripping with the blood of the sun on its edge. Earthen pots, packed with coffee beans and sun-dried roses, hang from twine, framing the windows and hearth.

The table is far too short for Nader, where he faces Claude, playing board games with him again. The stool whines under his bulky frame as he hunches over the low table. He glances at the pieces on the board, the sunlight dancing off their varnish, before looking back to the boy studying them intently. The floor creaks as he sighs, the gnarled wood threatening to crumble under his bulk.

Nader’s sigh sieves through his lips before he notices, and he weathers through the frown Claude shoots him. They both know how many rematches he’s demanded. His stamina on the battlefield seems to escape him when they play board games, and the realisation has him breathing back a chuckle.

Claude advances a piece, planting it just shy of the centre. A safe option that mobilises his minor units.

Even as Claude’s hands move away from the pieces, he still hunches over. His back, bowed low. His shadow, loping along the board and swallowing his pieces. Even after his turn finishes, his nerves look so tightly strung, they’d sing if they were plucked. His eyes sweep the field but his focus is solely on victory.

Nader spies the bandages taping Claude’s fingers where they steeple by his lip. The clotted cuts on the knuckles mash into the baby fat of his cheek. A scarf keeps his hair out of his face, tied tightly, clumsily, by himself. His fingers are long, talented and roughened from the hemp of a bowstring. They dance and dance, tapping on his thigh. A notch in his brow, a light in his eye sparks like striking flint, flickering in his pupils, their green rings incandescent.

It’s a look of impatience, rumination, and (dare he say it) cunning.

It shouldn’t suit him as much as it does.

Nader sighs, and takes his turn. He captures one of Claude’s stronger minor pieces, and the boy startles out of his seat.

“What! No!” Claude clutches at his own head when he throws it back. “How did I miss that?!”

He’s craned forward again, eyes scouring the board, a twist to his lip in his obsessive search. No matter how many games Claude plays with him, he always acts up when Nader takes a piece he didn’t think he would lose.

“It’s alright. You got plenty of pieces to pull off a win.” He doesn’t have to stretch when he ruffles the back of Claude’s hair, where his scarf doesn’t reach. “You’re still learning.”

“I know that! And don’t treat me like a kid.” Claude ducks. He adjusts his untouched headscarf again. “I’m already ten now.”

“Right, right,” Nader grants, schooling his lip straight when he nods. “You keep your eyes on the bigger picture, and I won’t treat you like a kid again. We got a deal?”

Claude is missing three teeth. His face still has some dirt on it from where he was dragged along the mud by the horse His Majesty strapped him to. But with the honey sunset casting his clever eyes aglow, it’s a great smile that Claude beams at him.

“Deal!”

* * *

A year passes. Claude’s father doesn’t bring him to the palace often, but there’s always a feast when he does.

Beeswax dribbles down the candelabras lining the table, stretched out to the edges of the hall like open arms. The tablecloth is stained with wine, strewn with scraps of game and splashes of sauce, thick like blood and bright like gold. Claude licks his plate clean, the last one at the table when the feast comes to a close, the moon egg-white in the night overhead.

A server Claude recognises brings him dessert: a berry tart he’s always liked.

He scarfs it down before he realises. Something is off. The taste; it’s more bitter than he remembers. About the retreating server, the backwards glances they throw his way. The wild glow in their eyes that smacks of glee, as the tart settles like lead in his stomach.

Minutes later, Claude crouches over a toilet.

He snatches away the finger from his mouth. His throat spasms, stomach lurches, until his tart splatters onto the toilet bowl. A feverish warmth crashes over him with each retch, squeezing from his pores. The stink of berries mixed with his stomach acid claw at the air, drool and vomit dripping from his mouth.

His spit smacks into the toilet bowl before he flushes it. Water pools cool in his palms before he rinses his mouth. Pulling out a vial from the breast pocket of his jacket, Claude pinches his nose and downs its contents in one, unpeeling his tongue from the roof of his mouth, his nose wrinkling like a raisin right after.

His father waits for him by the palace gates.

“Wandered off again, did you?” The moon sharpens the shadows of his face, when he frowns at Claude jogging up to his side.

“Just had to go to the toilet.”

Claude says that with his best smile, and the topic is no more. He feasts till dawn with his father, and never eats a berry tart again.

* * *

When Claude turns sixteen, his parents tell him everything.

“I’m a what?”

His mother swats his father’s side, whose laugh transforms into a thick clearing of his throat. Claude doesn’t know who to look to between his parents. He wonders if there’s some middle part he’s missing. The in-between where his father’s forehead wrinkles like the skin of a nutmeg, or the in-between where his mother’s smile is the color of a pale lily. The in-between where Claude laid. He wonders if this is what it really is when his mother turns her kind, green eyes to him, glinting like a mirror.

“You’re of a noble family from the Leicester Alliance,” his mother tells him again. “You are a von Riegan.”

Claude’s sharp for his age. He’s no stranger to Fòdlan’s politics either. But the news sends his head spinning for a week. His crest weighs like a stone in his palm—a scarred crescent moon he stares at like it isn’t his. His parents tell him he can do what he wants as long as he keeps their secret. The spinning in his head becomes gears locking into place.

He stops his homeschooling, and packs his bags for the Officers Academy.

* * *

His first round-table meeting for the Leicester Alliance draws to a close, three hours past schedule.

His fingers fly over the lock to his personal quarters. Claude’s breath pours back into his body when he is finally alone in his room. It spills out when he slumps and sinks against the door, the heels of his palms digging splotches into the back of his eyelids.

The council’s arguing bounces off the inside of his skull, shrill, unending. How best to fortify House Goneril’s efforts defending against the Almyrans. The Eastern Menace. The foreign savages. If there’s any one thing the Alliance leaders can agree on, it’s to keep the outsiders out. Where they belong.

His eyes trace the antler symbolism embossed on the high ceilings. His gaze skates to the gold and green curtains, parted to the high windows overseeing Derdriu.

The sun drips orange over the carpets, setting over Fòdlan’s Throat, and Claude’s sigh threads through the open air.

* * *

Garreg Mach Monastery. Home to the Officers Academy; a microcosm of Fòdlan. Three houses for three countries. The Church of Seiros looms over all.

The Golden Deer House mirrors the Leicester Alliance all too well. Scattered. Disunified. Too tunnel-visioned for any greater good to stand on its own two feet from the sum of the parts. He takes it upon himself to ferret out its secrets. To root out the path he’ll make for his own dream in the ancient monastery.

He expects the Gloucester son with the weird hair to be wary, but not this much.

“To be frank, it would have been better if you had never shown your face around here.”

Claude watches Lorenz’s retreating back after some fresh, run-of-the-mill grievance with him, wondering aloud what his problem is.

He thinks to himself how refreshing it would have been if Lorenz seethed to his face. But Fòdlan likes to nurture its hatred behind closed doors, letting it simmer over a boil under a closed lid. They like to dress it up as righteous, haughty, or deserved.

Just another way this place wasn’t like home.

It wasn’t that Lorenz was wrong; Claude did want to search the Holy Tomb. But the stained glass windows of the Church really are pretty, catching the sunlight. If he closes his eyes and faces the painted glaze, the light will bleed through his eyelids dark pink, and the thoughts grow a little quieter, for a moment.


End file.
